CHAPTER II
The Valley of the Nile
The Nile Valley has been called “one continuous cemetery of buried civilizations.” From prehistoric time, it has been regarded as the home of Black Folk, and its southern portions, above the First Cataract, were known to the Greeks and Romans as Ethiopia, the “Land of Burnt Faces.” The term occurs in the writings of Homer, dating about the 9th century B.C., and some think it had currency before that. Black people were present in the Aegaean world in the Pre-Homeric period. The early Greeks of Homeric and pre-Homeric times included in the term “Ethiopia” lands and peoples in both Africa and Asia.
In the very dawn of Greek literature we hear in the Iliad (i. 423–5) how Zeus and other gods went each year to feast for twelve days among “the blameless Ethiopians,” while the Odyssey (i. 22–6) represents Poseǐdon as doing the same upon his own account. Here, too, among “the Ocean streams” the cranes made their winter home, carrying “death and destruction” to the Pygmies. Black Memnon, King of Ethiopia, was one of Homer’s heroes. Homer sings of a black man, a “reverend herald”:
Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
Short, woolly curls, o’erfleeced his bending head, …
Eurybates, in whose large soul alone,
Ulysses viewed an image of his own.1
Homer, Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny and others frequently mentioned Ethiopia. Homer speaks of eastern and western Ethiopia. Herodotus places Ethiopia southwest of Egypt as the last inhabited land in that direction. There is gold there, elephants, ebony and the men are tall, handsome and long-lived.
The term “Ethiopia” was employed mainly by Greeks and Romans; the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, Assyrians and Hebrews had other names for Ethiopia. The Ethiopians designated the country or a large part of it as “Ques” or “Kesh,” which the Egyptians translated into “Kush.” Parts of Ethiopia near Egypt were called “Land of the Kupar” or “Korti.” Below that came various districts: Mam, Mash, Napata, etc. Further south were Yesbe, Meroe, and Thabre. The Egyptians called part of Ethiopia nearest them “the Land of Nehesi”; that is, the land of the blacks. Beyond that was Khent, the borderland; and Ta Sti, “the Land of the Bow.” During the Middle and New Kingdoms, the Egyptians called Ethiopia “Kash” or “Kush.” In the farthest confines of Kush lay Punt, the cradle of their race.
There has been much dispute as to the location of Punt. Many think it was on the shores of the Red Sea or even in Arabia or perhaps in Somaliland; but the sort of goods which Egypt brought from Punt, gold and tropical products, point rather to the region of the Great Lakes. Semitic writers called the country by the name which its own people gave to it, Cashi, and Kush. It will be noted that nearly all these writers merged Kush and Egypt as forming essentially one people.
After the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the term Ethiopia was used by the Greeks usually to designate only regions situated in Africa. These regions corresponded roughly to the territory which we now know as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The Arabic name Sudan or Bilad-es-Sudan was applied to the country of the blacks stretching from the Nile west to the Atlantic. The part around Dongola eventually received the name of Nubia, meaning land of gold, and it is known by that name today.
“The Ethiopians conceived themselves,” says Diodorus Siculus (Lib. III), “to be of greater antiquity than any other nation; and it is probable that, born under the sun’s path, its warmth may have ripened them earlier than other men. They supposed themselves also to be the inventors of worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every religious practice.” Pliny says that Ethiopia was a vigorous and powerful country at the time of the Trojan War when Memnon was its king. Strabo, Diodorus and Pliny conceived Ethiopia as the kingdoms of Meroe and Napata.
Our knowledge of the history of Ethiopia comes from Ethiopian documents and from Egyptian, Assyrian and Hebrew sources. The Egyptian records of Ethiopian history are preserved on their monuments and in manuscripts. The Ethiopian records are preserved mainly on sandstone steles, and inscriptions on monuments. All those which have been recovered date from the eighth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. There are many Greek and Roman accounts, including Homer, ninth century B.C.; Hesiod, eighth century B.C.; Herodotus, fifth century B.C.; Diodorus Siculus, first century B.C.; Strabo, first century B.C.; Pliny, first century A.D.; Ptolemy, second century A.D. and Dion Cassius, second century A.D. There are a number of other references by literary writers, more or less authentic, as for instance, Callisthenes and Josephus. Fragments of still other writers, writing in the classical age, are often referred to. It is interesting to remember that most of the accounts of these authors refer to the ancient Ethiopians in exalted terms, and consider them as the oldest, the wisest and most just of men.
The racial identity of the Ethiopians has often been disputed. There is no question but that they were dark brown or black people. If, however, scientists go beyond that and, like Reisner, apparently confine the designation “Negro” to black people with close-curled hair, flat noses, thick lips and prognathism, many of the Ethiopians were not Negroes; although there is distinct evidence of the wide prevalence of precisely this type of Negro among the blacks of Ethiopia; but according to such definition, most black people of Africa and the world are not Negroes and never were, leaving the number of “pure” Negroes too small to form a race.2
Lepsius declared the Ethiopians were of the same stock as the modern Nubians or, as he concluded later, the Beja. Sayce and Reisner admit that there was Negro blood in Ethiopia but declare that the ruling classes were “Lybians.” Randall-Maclver declares that the Ethiopians were Negroes and that the century 741 to 663 B.C. was the heyday of the Negro.
All this seems much like fruitless quibbling and comes from the fact that there is no agreement among anthropologists as to what a race is and particularly who are Negroes; and finally as to just what could possibly be expected in human culture of the Negro race. As Montesquieu once wrote ironically of the arguments of the eighteenth century, “It is almost unthinkable that God, who is goodness itself, could have determined to place a soul, much less a good soul, in a body so black and repulsive as that of the Negro.”
Written Ethiopian records go back many centuries. They are in the form of inscriptions carved on stone walls, or on slabs of stone, and a few records have been found written in ink or painted on plaster. Ethiopians had no limestone, marble or alabaster, such as were common in Egypt, and were forced to use soft sandstone or sedimentary rock. Their inscriptions, therefore, have not been as well preserved.
They fall into three general groups: those using the Egyptian hieroglyphs; those using the Meroitic hieroglyphs, and those using the Meroitic script. The Egyptian hierology dates from the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ, when the political and cultural relations between Ethiopia and Egypt were strong. By the fifth century B.C. the language had become distinct, and an Ethiopian hieroglyphic was used with distinctive innovations. Finally, came the script which had an alphabet of twenty-three characters, and which is not yet altogether translatable. It is possible that the script was invented before the hieroglyphics. Diodorus says that whereas in Egypt the priests alone knew the hieroglyphic writing, in Ethiopia all writers used it.
“The oldest and most important source of Ethiopian history is the Stele of Piankhy, erected at Gebel Barkal about 720 B.C. Its wealth of historical detail, its picturesqueness and fervor of language, and above all the incidental manner in which it reveals the ability, character, and magnanimity of a great personality, have led scholars to place this celebrated inscription among the most valuable of primary historical documents that have come down to the present from the ancient world.”3
The territory formerly occupied by Ethiopia has today, in the northern part, a rainless desert; in the central part, a steppe country, fading off toward the south into a savannah country. In the southern part it is a region of rain and forests. In Ethiopia is situated the greater part of one of the large river systems of the world, the Nile and its tributaries. In the east are two smaller river systems, both of which are drying up. In the west, are three dead rivers which once flowed into the Nile, but are now nearly dry. There are numbers of other indications of ancient rivers. There are no lakes in the territory but traces of ancient lakes now represented by salt beds and small oases.
ETHIOPIA ABOUT 750 B.C.
Today, Ethiopia is divided into the following districts:
Nubia roughly includes the Nile Valley from the First Cataract down to the junction of the Atbara and the Blue Nile. From Alexandria to the First Cataract and from the First Cataract to the junction of the rivers, is each a section of about five hundred miles. Throughout Nubia, the Nile River does not overflow, even in flood. Here and there it fertilizes a narrow stretch on the banks, but that is exceptional. For the most part the desert comes down to the banks. Thus, the Nile Valley in Nubia today has very limited economic value, and its inhabitants are scarce and poor. On the other hand, in ancient times, this region was occupied by a large prosperous population, with many towns and cities. There is no doubt that once the Nile at its flood rose at least twenty feet higher than today and irrigated an extensive area. There were well-wooded regions where now the Valley is practically without forests.
At the junction of the Atbara and the Blue Nile begins “the Island of Meroe.” It is almost completely surrounded by the waters of the Nile and its branches, which reach up into the mountains of Abyssinia to Lake Tsana. This island resembles Ireland in shape and size.
The northern part today is a desert; south of this there is tall grass with bushes and trees, which shrivel during the dry season. At the southern end is a zone fairly well watered with much fertile soil.
Here again there is much evidence that in ancient times the island was much more fertile and densely populated. It formed the heart of the Ethiopian empire. Here was the capital city, Meroe, the largest, most powerful, and probably the second oldest Ethiopian city. Meroe is mentioned by Herodotus and tradition today says that the people in ancient times “were powerful and wise, and of great wealth, but God grew angry with them and stopped the rain.”
The Eastern Desert extends from the southern boundaries of Egypt to the northern boundary of Abyssinia, and from the Nile to the Red Sea. It is a hilly plateau, mostly desert, but with some arable tracts. In this Eastern Desert dwell the Beja tribes who may represent descendants of those who in ancient times populated Ethiopia and Egypt. They are black and brown with curly or frizzly hair, and present many of the same types as American Negroes do today.
The Western Desert includes the whole western side of the Nile Valley until it merges with the Sahara. On the north, it begins with the Mediterranean Sea, and sweeps down 1,500 miles to Equatorial Africa. It is one of the most desolate parts of the earth, without animal or vegetable life. “For miles and miles there is but a vast ocean with flat sand without feature or hill, mound, rock or stone.”
In the far southern section, the sand gives way to stony ground, and there are ranges, which support a small nomad population. Again much of this desert was probably well-watered in ancient times, but today for a stretch of 1,800 miles the Nile receives no western tributary, although in earlier times it received several rivers. Ruins of ancient settlements and petrified trees dot the banks of these dry streams.
Research in the Nile Valley and study of the records establish the fact that ancient Ethiopia in what is now the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was the seat of one of the oldest and greatest of the world’s civilizations. The golden age of this culture dates from the middle of the eighth century before Christ to the middle of the fourth century after Christ. But its beginnings go back to the dawn of history, four or five thousand years before Christ, and in a way Ethiopian history parallels that of ancient Egypt.
A reasonable interpretation of historical evidence would show that the history of the Nile Valley was something as follows: Negro tribes migrated down the Nile, slowly penetrating what is now modern Egypt. They there gradually came in contact and mingled with whites from the north and Semites from the east. Stimulated to an unusual degree by this contact of the three primitive stocks of mankind, the resulting culture of Egypt was gradually developed.
Of what race, then, were the Egyptians? They certainly were not white in any sense of the modern use of that word—neither in color nor physical measurement; in hair nor countenance; in language nor social customs. They seem to have stood in relationship nearest the Negro race in earliest times, and then gradually through the infiltration of Mediterranean and Semitic elements became what would be described in America as a light mulatto stock of octoroons or quadroons. This stock was varied continually; now by new infiltration of Negro blood from the south, now by Semitic blood from the east, now by Caucasic types from the north and west.
Herodotus, who knew and saw Egyptians four hundred and fifty years before Christ, in an incontrovertible passage alludes to the Egyptians as “black and curly-haired”4—a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the brunette Mediterranean type; nor was this a mere slip of the pen, for again, in his second book (Chapters 55–57), he tells of the legend of the two black doves, who flew from Egypt and became soothsayers at Dodona. He explains that the women were called doves because they were foreigners, and their words sounded like the noise of birds; and then he says: “Lastly, by calling the dove black, the Dodonaeans indicated the woman was an Egyptian.” Further, he says, “There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race. Before I heard any mention of the fact from others, I had remarked it myself. My own conjectures were founded first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times.”5 Aeschylus, mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.
Diodorus says that the Ethiopians declared that the Egyptians were settlers from Ethiopia. “That Egypt itself is a land built up by the slime and mud which the Nile brought down from Ethiopia. Most of the Egyptian laws and customs are of Ethiopian origin.”
The Egyptians themselves, in later days, affirmed that they and their civilization came from the south and from the tribes of Punt; and certainly “at the earliest period in which human remains have been recovered Egypt and Lower Nubia appear to have formed culturally and racially one land.”6 Modern archaeological and anthropological research lends some confirmation to the tradition that the original homeland of many of the people of Egypt and of their culture was Equatorial Africa. Many evidences of Negro descent are revealed by the bones and statues of Egypt’s ancient dead.
“The more we learn of Nubia and the Sudan,” writes Dr. D. Randall-Maclver, “the more evident does it appear that what was most characteristic in the predynastic culture of Egypt is due to intercourse with the interior of Africa and the immediate influence of that permanent Negro element which has been present in the population of Southern Egypt from remotest times to our own day.”
Sir Flinders Petrie, in the same vein, writes that it is remarkable how renewed vitality came to Egypt from the south. The First Dynasty appears to have moved up from Punt. The Third Dynasty which led to the Fourth shows a strongly Ethiopian face in Sa Nekht; the Twelfth Dynasty we can trace to a Galla origin; the Eighteenth Dynasty was an Ethiopian race paled by marrying a Libyan princess; the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was from distant Meroe.
Volney in the eighteenth century expressed the belief that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes, or at any rate, strongly Negroid. Recently, Ripley, in his Races of Europe, agrees with this fact. Dr. Randall-Maclver, and Dr. Arthur Thompson, after an extensive survey of skeletons of ancient Egypt, said that of the Egyptians studied from the early predynastic to the Fifth Dynasty, twenty-four per cent of the males and nineteen per cent of the females must be classified as Negro. In every character they conform to the Negro type. From the Sixth to the Eighteenth Dynasty, twenty per cent of the males and fifteen per cent of the females were Negroes. There were in all these cases a number of intermediate types with Negroid traits, but the Negro features were not sufficiently distinct to class these skeletons with Negroes.
Others have shown Negro individuals with woolly or frizzly hair, thick noses, and thick lips, portrayed in the predynastic period of Egypt. Griffith says that more than one Nubian can be traced as holding a high position in Egypt during the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. The famous Stele of Yna shows that in the Sixth Dynasty, Asiatics in Palestine were annihilated by an army of many tens of thousands made up of soldiers recruited from among various groups of Negroes. In the fourth, third, second and first millenniums before Christ, there were repeated migrations and invasions of African peoples into Northern Ethiopia and Egypt.
Among the Pharaohs of the earlier dynasties whose statues or recovered bones show them to have been deeply tinged with Negro blood are King Den of the First Dynasty, King Khasekhemui of the Third Dynasty, and King Sa-Nekht of the Third Dynasty. Sir Harry Johnston writes: “The Dynastic Egyptians were not far distant in physical type from the Galla of today, but they had perhaps some element of the proto-Semite; and their language, which is still rather a puzzle to classifiers, though mainly Kushite in its features, exhibited early in its history the influence of Semitic speech, and no doubt absorbed into itself elements of the Libyan sister, which it perhaps found already extending to the valley of the Nile. The Dynastic Egyptians evidently concentrated themselves in the narrow strip of fertility along the banks of the Nile, not colonizing very markedly the Red Sea coast-lands. By about 8,000 years ago they had become the conquerors and rulers of Lower and Upper Egypt. The inhabitants of Egypt were thenceforth a people in which Hamitic (Libyan-Kushite), Semitic, Nilotic and even Sudanese-Negro elements were fused.”
In Egyptian sculpture and painting, the Negro type appears as a slave and captive, as a tribute-bearer and also as ruler and official. The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so familiar to all the world; the Sphinxes of Tanis, the statue from Fayum; the statue of the Esquiline at Rome; and the Colossi of Bubastis, all represent Negroid types. They are described by Petrie as “having high cheek bones, flat cheeks, both in one plane, a massive nose, firm projecting lips, and thick hair, with an austere and almost savage expression of power.”7
Blyden, the modern black leader of West Africa, said of the Sphinx at Gizeh: “Her features are decidedly of the African or Negro type, with ‘expanded nostrils.’ If, then, the Sphinx was placed here—looking out in majestic and mysterious silence over the empty plain where once stood the great city of Memphis in all its pride and glory, as an ‘emblematic representation of the king’—is not the inference clear as to the peculiar type of race to which that king belonged?”8
Chamberlain says of the Negro in Egypt: “Ancient Egypt knew him, both bond and free, and his blood flowed in the veins of not a few of the mighty Pharaohs.” Besides these marked individual instances, “there is the fact that the Egyptian race itself in general had a considerable element of Negro blood, and one of the prime reasons why no civilization of the type of that of the Nile arose in other parts of the continent, if such a thing were at all possible, was that Egypt acted as a sort of channel by which the genius of Negroland was drafted off into the service of Mediterranean and Asiatic culture.”9
To one familiar with the striking and beautiful types arising from the mingling of Negro with Latin and Germanic types in America, the puzzle of the Egyptian type is easily solved. It was unlike any of its neighbors and a unique type until one views the modern mulatto; then the faces of Rahotep and Nefert, of Khafra and Amenemhat I, of Aahmes and Nefertari, and even of the great Ramessu II, become curiously familiar. The Egyptian treatment and arrangement of the hair and beard indicate strongly their Negroid affinity and similar coiffures suitable to crisp hair can be seen in modern Africa.
Of course, the number of those who deny the presence of Negro blood to any great extent in Egypt is large. One must remember that Egyptology, starting in 1821, grew up during the African slave trade, the Sugar Empire and the Cotton Kingdom. Few scientists during that period dared to associate the Negro race with humanity, much less with civilization. A curious incident of the World War throws interesting light on Egyptian blood today: When the “Anzacs” from New Zealand and Australia came to be quartered in Egypt, they stared at the fellahin and cried: “My god! We didn’t know Egyptians was niggers!”
The history of Egypt is a science in itself and must not detain us. Before the reign of the first recorded king, five thousand years or more before Christ, there had already existed in Egypt a culture and art arising by long evolution from the days of paleolithic man, among a people with certainly some Negroid characteristics. At the end of the period the empire fell apart into Egyptian and Ethiopian halves, and a silence of three centuries ensued.
The middle empire arose 3064 B.C. and lasted nearly twenty-four centuries. The ancient glories of Egypt were restored and surpassed. At the same time there is strong continuous pressure from unruly Negro tribes of the upper Nile Valley, and we get some idea of the fear which they inspired throughout Egypt when we read of the great national rejoicing which followed the triumph of Usertesen III (circa 2660–2622 B.C.), over these hordes. He drove them back and attempted to confine them to the edge of the Nubian Desert above the Second Cataract. Hemmed in here, they set up a state about this time and founded Napata.
Notwithstanding this repulse of black men, less than one hundred years later a full-blooded Negro from the south, Ra Nehesi, was seated on the throne of the Pharaohs and was called “The king’s eldest son.” This may mean that an incursion from the far south had placed a black conqueror on the throne. At any rate, the whole empire was in some way shaken, and two hundred years later the invasion of the Hyksos began, whose domination lasted for five hundred years.
The redemption of Egypt from these barbarians came from Upper Egypt, led by Aahmes. He founded in 1703 B.C. the new empire, which lasted fifteen hundred years. His Queen, Nefertari, “the most venerated figure of Egyptian history;”10 was a woman of royal Ethiopian lineage and Negroid characteristics. She was represented on the Egyptian monument with “a complexion of ebony-blackness,” and as Chamberlain says was “a Negress of great beauty, strong personality, and remarkable administrative ability.” She was for years associated in the government with her son, Amenhotep I, who succeeded his father. Queen Nefertari was highly venerated and many monuments were erected in her honor; she was venerated as “ancestress and founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty” and styled “the wife of the god Ammon” In addition to being the wife of Aahmes, the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, she was also the mother of Amenhotep I, and according to some authorities, the grandmother of Thothmes I, and the great-grandmother of Hathshepsut and Thothmes III—two of the greatest sovereigns that ever sat on an Egyptian throne.11
Another strain of Negro blood came into the line of the Pharaohs with Mutem-ua, wife of Thothmes IV, whose son, Amenhotep III, had a Negroid physiognomy. Amenhotep III was famous as a builder and his reign (circa 1400 B.C.) is distinguished by a marked improvement in Egyptian art and architecture. He it was who built the great temple of Ammon at Luxor and the colossi of Memnon.
The whole of the period in a sense culminated in the great Ramessu II, the oppressor of the Hebrews, who with his Egyptian, Libyan and Negro armies fought half the world. His reign, however, was the beginning of decline, and foes began to press Egypt from the white north and the black south. The priests transferred their power to Thebes, while the Assyrians under Nimrod overran lower Egypt. The center of interest is now transferred to Ethiopia. From records and reports of expeditions, the history of Ethiopia can be reconstructed as follows:
In prehistoric times, Ethiopians traded gold, ivory and skins with the Egyptians for food. Caravans from Ethiopia and even from places south visited Egypt. Egyptians and Ethiopians were friendly during the First and Second Dynasties but, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty, an Egyptian Pharaoh raided Ethiopia and returned with black prisoners and live stock. He probably went south as far as the Fourth Cataract or even to Khartoum. During the Fifth Dynasty, when the Egyptians made war on the people in the eastern desert, the Egyptian soldiers were joined by Ethiopian soldiers, including blacks from five provinces. This led to a conference between the Pharaoh and the chiefs of the blacks and some Egyptian control over Ethiopia.
As social order was overthrown after the Sixth Dynasty, Egyptian control over Ethiopia ceased and tribute was no longer paid. In the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties there were punitive expeditions against Ethiopia and also wide-spread trade. Blacks came north into Egypt both as free settlers and as slaves. The Pharaohs of the Eleventh Dynasty extended their influence south beyond Thebes and Ethiopians had probably moved north and invaded Egyptian territory as far as Thebes. Kings of the Twelfth Dynasty made raids into Nubia and pushed the borders of Egypt to the Third Cataract. They opened gold mines and Ethiopian forced labor resulted. The Pharaoh Usertesen I conquered a number of tribes and districts and extended the power of Egypt; but it was Usertesen III who took Egyptian power to the Second Cataract and built two forts. He used Ethiopian soldiers with Egyptian officers.
Thus we see that as soon as the civilization below the Second Cataract reached a height noticeably above that of Ethiopia, there was continued effort to protect that civilization against the incursion of barbarians. Hundreds of campaigns through thousands of years repeatedly subdued or checked the blacks and brought them in as captives to mingle their blood with the Egyptian nation; but the Egyptian frontier was not advanced.
A separate and independent Ethiopian culture finally began to rise during the middle empire of Egypt and centered at Napata and Meroe. Widespread trade in gold, ivory, precious stones, skins, wood and works of handicraft arose. The Negro began to be the great trader of Egypt. This new wealth of Ethiopia excited the cupidity of the Pharaohs and led to aggression and larger intercourse, until at last, when the dread Hyksos appeared, Ethiopia became both a physical and cultural refuge for conquered Egypt.
During the Hyksos invasion, i.e., in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties, many noble Egyptian families migrated to Ethiopia and intermarried with the ruling houses of Ethiopia. Later one of these Egypto-Ethiopian families, ruling under the Hyksos at Thebes, revolted, and through the aid of Ethiopian soldiers, expelled the invaders and established the great Eighteenth Dynasty.
The ensuing New Empire witnessed the gradual incorporation of Ethiopia into Egypt, although the darker kingdom continued to resist. Both Aahmes and Amenhotep I sent expeditions into Ethiopia, and in the latter’s day sons of the reigning Pharaoh began to assume the title of “Royal Son of Kush” in some such way as the son of the King of England becomes the Prince of Wales. Trade relations were renewed with Punt under circumstances which lead us to place that land in the region of the African lakes. The Sudanese tribes were aroused by these and other incursions, until the revolts became formidable in the fourteenth century B.C.
Egyptian culture, however, gradually conquered Ethiopia where her armies could not, and Egyptian religion and civil rule began to center in the darker kingdom. When, therefore, Sheshang I, the Libyan, usurped the throne of the Pharaohs in the tenth century B.C., the Egyptian legitimate dynasty went to Napata as king-priests and established a theocratic monarchy. Gathering strength, the Ethiopian kingdom under this dynasty expanded north about 750 B.C. and for a century ruled all Egypt.
At present, we have the names of forty-nine kings and queens of Ethiopia, from 750 B.C. to 355 A.D., and records of twenty-seven others, whose names are not known, making seventy-six rulers in all. During the early Napata period, extending from 750 to 308 B.C., there were twenty-six kings, of whom the most noted were Piankhy, 744–710; Shabaka, 710–700; Taharka, 688–663; and Nastasen, 328–308 B.C. The first king, Piankhy, was Egyptian bred and a mulatto type; but his successors showed more and more evidence of Negro blood—Kashta the Kushite, Shabaka, Taharka, and Tanutamen.
Piankhy ascended the throne of Ethiopia about 744 B.C., and ruled thirty-four years. He inherited from his father, Kashta, dominion over Egypt as far northward as Thebes, and perhaps for 200 or 300 miles farther, and he served as governor or viceroy over Egypt under the Ethiopian crown before the conquest. Piankhy was religious and peaceful, but he was also a practical statesman, with a river navy and trained soldiers.
In 732 B.C. Piankhy was informed by courier that a Libyan prince from the Delta was marching south. Piankhy waited for the Libyan to get as far as possible from his base. When he reached Hermophlis, 400 miles south of the Mediterranean, Piankhy started the attack, assembling an army at Napata, and ordering them to march northward to Thebes. Finally, he himself joined his armies, swept through Egypt, and received the submission of sixteen princes. The Libyan leader himself wrote: “So now, through fear of thee, I have fled to the uttermost swamps, down by the great green sea.”
Egypt thus became a tribute-paying dependency upon Ethiopia, with rulers whose titles were confirmed by the Kings of Ethiopia. Eventually, in 710 B.C., when Piankhy died, the Ethiopian council at Napata chose Shabaka as king of the two lands. He kept peace and was a good administrator. The influence of Egypt was restored and he tried to stem the power of Assyria by negotiation. Diodorus says that Shabaka “went beyond all his predecessors in his worship of the Gods and his kindness to his subjects.” Herodotus says that he abolished capital punishment in Egypt.
During Ethiopian rule, a royal son was appointed to rule Egypt, just as formerly a royal Egyptian had ruled Kush. This Ethiopian kingdom showed its Negro peculiarities: first, in its worship of Sudanese gods; secondly, in the custom of female succession to the throne; and thirdly, by the election of the kings from among the claimants to the throne. “It was the heyday of the Negro. For the greater part of the century … Egypt itself was subject to the blacks, just as, in the New Empire, the Sudan, had been subject to Egypt.”
Shabaka attempted to restore Egyptian art. He began works at Karnak, and preserved historical documents. Finally, however, the Assyrians defeated the forces of Egypt and Ethiopia at the battle of Eltekeh in Assyria. Shabaka abdicated, and Shabataka succeeded him. At last, 688 to 663 B.c, came the greatest of the Ethiopian kings, Taharka. His reign, with all its wars, was an era of prosperity and cultural advancement. Weigall calls his reign: “That astonishing epoch of nigger domination”; and Randall-Maclver says: “It seems amazing that an African Negro should have been able with any sort of justification to style himself Emperor of the World.” Taharka ascended the throne 688 B.C. at the age of about forty-two. For fifteen years Taharka fostered the economic, cultural, and religious life of Ethiopia and Egypt. The trade of the country increased and there was money to repair the ancient temples and build new ones. Taharka established friendly alliances with western Asia and with Assyria, and the Assyrian expedition against Egypt and Ethiopia was stopped. The Hebrew Bible chronicles this as the downfall of Sennacherib, and notes Ethiopia’s trade.12
Taharka’s building at Karnak, although never finished, was planned as one of the most striking in the ancient world. The temple built at Thebes has a relief representing the four courts of the four quarters of the Nilotic world: Dedun the great God of Ethiopia, represents the South; Sopd, the Eastern Desert; Sedek, the West Desert; while Horus represents the North. Petrie says: “This shows how Southern was the center of thought, when the whole of Egypt was recorded as the North.” Some writers say that Taharka traveled beyond his domains, and Strabo even declares that, with four other kings, Taharka led expeditions as far as the Straits of Gibraltar.
Eventually the Assyrians were too strong for Taharka and he had to give up Egypt and retire into Ethiopia and the “night of death.” Tanutamen, his successor, held back the Assyrian storm for a while (Nahum, iii, 1–19), but Ethiopian and Egyptian strength were eventually dashed to pieces. Egyptian temples were wrecked, and the conqueror, Ashurbanipal, declared: “I captured Thebes like a flood.”
The Assyrians conquered Northern Egypt, but the dynasty was continued in Southern Egypt by Ethiopian kings. Egyptian rule was revived briefly in Northern Egypt but this was followed by two invasions from Persia, 525–415 B.C. and 342–332 B.C., and finally by the domination of Egypt by Greece after 332 B.C.
Aspeluta, whose mother and sister are represented as full-blooded Negroes, ruled probably from 593–567 B.C. Horsiatef (c. 372–61 B.C.) made nine expeditions against the war-like tribes south of Meroe, and his successor was Nastasen (c. 328–308 B.C.) who removed the capital from Napata to Meroe, although Napata continued to be the religious capital and the Ethiopian kings were still crowned on its golden throne. In 525 or 524 B.C. Cambyses, the Persian, tried to invade Nubia, but was either defeated or his army died from starvation.
During the middle period, 308–225 B.C., there were ten rulers, five reigning at Napata and five at Meroe. Then the kingdoms became united again under Ergamenes, 225–200 B.C., and six kings reigned over the whole of Ethiopia; then came nine kings, of whom four reigned at Meroe, and five at Napata. These were succeeded by three kings ruling over Ethiopia until 15 A.D. From that time to 355 A.D. there ruled twenty-two kings over a united Ethiopia. The Ptolemies did not invade Nubia but tried to obtain trade by peaceful inroads. Ergamenes was brought up at the court of Ptolemy II and the “nine nations” of Ethiopia were brought under complete control of Egypt without war.
Meroe, between the Atabara and the Blue Nile, was founded later than Napata, and probably not earlier than the eighth century B.C. Kings reigned at Meroe in all for about six hundred years. It stands on the banks of the Nile, midway between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and is accessible to caravans coming across the Atabara from the Red Sea. It was, therefore, the natural outlet to the Nile of the desert route from the east. It was said to have had a standing army of two hundred thousand and four thousand artisans. The people adopted the Egyptian hieroglyphic system of writing which they modified somewhat. Excavations so far have not discovered anything in Meroe older than the first century. It may not have been a flourishing city in early times, but was probably always an important trading center. It developed greatly after the downfall of Napata. It was the center of a network of roads leading in all directions. It had palaces and baths, temples and pyramids, and was widely famous.
It was here that the Candaces reigned as queens—the designation being a title rather than a given name. Pliny tells us that one Candace of the time of Nero had had forty-four predecessors on the throne. The prestige of Ethiopia at this time was considerable throughout the world. Pseudo-Callisthenes tells of a visit of Alexander the Great to Candace, Queen of Meroe, fabulous perhaps but showing her fame: Candace will not let him enter Ethiopia and says he is not to scorn her people because they are black, for they are whiter in soul than his white folk. She sent him gold, maidens, parrots, sphinxes, and a crown of emeralds and pearls. She ruled eighty tribes, who were ready to punish those who attacked her.
On the death of Cleopatra, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire and Augustus sent a prefect there. The power of Ethiopia declined before black invaders from the west. The Prefect Gallus summoned these chiefs and granted them their independence under the power of Rome in 29 A.D. After his death, the blacks revolted and advanced northward into the Thebaid. The Romans sent a great army of 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry to suppress 30,000 rebels. The Romans were victorious and advanced on the Ethiopians at Napata, where a Candace, a masculine woman with one eye, was reigning. She is probably the “Candace” mentioned in Acts viii, 27. Petronius captured Napata, and 1,000 prisoners were sent to Caesar as slaves and many sold at auction. Nevertheless as soon as Petronius left Candace attacked the Roman garrison at Premis where the Pharaohs had formerly had a fort. The Ethiopians demanded the right to lay their case before Caesar, which was granted, and Caesar remitted the tribute.
The Roman Emperor Nero, A.D. 64–68, planned to invade Ethiopia and sent some scouts to report. They penetrated as far as the region of the Sadd. For the next 200 years the Nubians and other desert tribes did as they pleased, while the power of Ethiopia continued to decline. From the beginning of the third century, tribes from the eastern desert called the Blemmyes, probably the modern Beja, invaded Egypt and plundered; becoming masters of Southern Egypt during the reign of Aurelian. The Romans continued to have so much trouble with their Ethiopian frontier that finally, when the Abyssinian Semitic mulattoes appeared in the east, the Emperor Diocletian invited the Nubians (Nobadae) from the west to repel them. These Nubians eventually embraced Christianity, and Northern Ethiopia came to be known in time as Nubia. The Roman garrisons were withdrawn and the Romans depended upon the Nubians from the western desert, Darfur and Kordofan, to protect their interests. Diocletian gave these Nubians land and a yearly subsidy and also subsidized the Beja. In this way, playing off tribe against tribe, he secured peace. Nevertheless during the reigns of Theodosius and Justinian the tribes broke into revolt again and again.
The Negro and Negroid populations of eastern Africa received, from time to time, Semitic immigration from the east and an Abyssinian empire was built up. These Semitic mulattoes lived on the highlands bordering the Red Sea and Asia. On both sides of this sea Negro blood is strongly in evidence, predominant in Africa and influential in Asia. Ludolphus, writing in the seventeenth century, says that the Abyssinians “are generally black, which [color] they most admire.” Trade and war united the two shores, and merchants have passed to and fro for thirty centuries
In this way Arabian, Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman influences spread slowly upon the Negro foundation. Early legendary history declared that a queen, Maqueda, or Nikaula of Sheba, a state of central Abyssinia, visited the Jewish Solomon in 1050 B.C. and had her son Menelik educated in Jerusalem. This was the supposed beginning of the Axumite kingdom, the capital of which, Axum, was a flourishing center of trade. Ptolemy Evergetes and his successors did much to open Abyssinia to the world, but most of the population of that day was nomadic. In the fourth century, Byzantine influences began to be felt, and in 330, St. Athanasius of Alexandria consecrated Fromentius as Bishop of Ethiopia. He tutored the heir to the Abyssinian kingdom and began its gradual Christianization. By the early part of the sixth century, Abyssinia was trading with India and Byzantium, and was so far recognized as a Christian country that the Emperor Justinian appealed to its King Kaleb to protect the Christians in southwestern Arabia. Kaleb conquered Yemen in 525 and held it fifty years, and sent 40,000 men against Mecca.
Eventually a Jewish princess, Judith, usurped the Axumite throne; the Abyssinians were expelled from Arabia, and a long period begins when, as Gibbon says, “encompassed by the enemies of their religion, the Ethiopians (i.e., the Abyssin-ians) slept for nearly a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.” Throughout the middle ages, however, the legend of a great Christian kingdom hidden away in Africa persisted, and the search for Prester John became one of the world quests.
It was the expanding power of Abyssinia that led Rome to call in the Nubians from the western desert. The Nubians had formed a strong league of tribes, and as the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia declined, they drove back the Abyssinians who had already established themselves at Meroe.
About 450 A.D. the Nubians under Silco, king of the Beja, had embraced Christianity and made Old Dongola their capital. The new capital replaced Napata and Meroe, and by the twelfth century, churches and brick dwellings had appeared. As the Mohammedan flood pressed up the Nile Valley it was the Nubians who held it back for two centuries. Omar, second of the Mohammedan Caliphs, invaded Egypt in 641. He sent twenty thousand men into Nubia but the Nubians in turn invaded Upper Egypt.
The Arabs attacked Dongola but finally the matter was arranged by the Nubians paying tribute, which they did for six hundred years. This history of revolt and defeat was kept up until 1225, when Saladin crushed the Nubians and the Arabs annexed Nubia in 1275. Between 1311 and 1412 fighting went on between Arabians and Nubians and finally the Christian kingdom of the Nubians fell in the sixteenth century.
Farther south other wild tribes pushed out of the Sudan. Chief among these were the Fung, who fixed their capital at Senaar, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile. The first king of the Fung was Amar Dunkas, who began to reign in 1515. When Selim conquered and invaded Egypt in 1617, the Fung embraced Islam and arranged to divide Ethiopia between themselves and the Arabs, so that the Fung ruled from the Third Cataract to Senaar from 1515 to 1789. Islam then swept on south in a great circle, skirted the Great Lakes, and then curled back to Somaliland, completely isolating Abyssinia. In the latter part of the seventeenth century a king of the Fung conquered the Shilluks. He was a patron of learning and built a mosque at Senaar. Another in the eighteenth century defeated the Abyssinians who had invaded Ethiopia. East of Wadai and nearer the Nile lay the kindred state of Darfur, a Nubian nation whose sultans reigned over two hundred years and which reached great prosperity in the early seventeenth century under Soliman Solon.
Before the Mohammedan power reached Abyssinia, the Portuguese pioneers had entered the country from the east and begun to open it again to European knowledge. Without doubt, in the centuries of silence, a civilization of some height had flourished in Abyssinia, but all authentic records were destroyed by fire in the tenth century. When the Portuguese came, the older Axumite kingdom had fallen and had been succeeded by a number of petty states.
The Sudanese kingdoms of the Sudan resisted the power of the Mameluke Beys in Egypt, and later the power of the Turks, until the nineteenth century, when the Sudan was made nominally a part of Egypt. Continuous upheaval, war, and conquest had by this time done their work and little of ancient Ethiopian culture survived the new and increasing slave trade.
From 1789 to 1821 there were a number of kings but a general state of anarchy. During this time the Fung tried to annex northern Ethiopia but were driven back with slaughter. In 1820, Mohammed Ali sent his son with Turks and Arabs to conquer Nubia. He defeated the Mameluke Beys at Dongola and then marched through Ethiopia, but was killed in 1822 just after he had founded Khartoum. Mohammed Ali avenged this terribly and eventually in 1839 determined to exploit the Sudan for gold and slaves. He stirred up strife among the chiefs and took their land and destroyed their people. About 1840, Mohammed Ali’s Sudan included all the territory formerly belonging to Napata and Meroe and from then until 1880 Ethiopia was reduced to a state of ruin and misery by the Arab masters of the Egyptians.
The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal, eventually stirred up revolt in the Sudan by loosing the hold of the Arab taskmasters on the natives. Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed Ahmad, who claimed to be the Messiah (Mahdi), the Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to resist a hated religion and Egyptian oppression. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka, drove both Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years.
The Mahdi was a black Kushite born in the Dongola Province, the son of a boat builder. The Mohammedans expected the Saviour to appear in 1882. Mohammed Ahmad announced publicly that he was the Mahdi in 1881. The authorities tried to capture him, but he escaped, defeating the governor of Fashoda in the mountains of southern Kordofan and then seized Kordofan in 1883. He massacred the army of the Englishman Hicks Pasha, 10,000 strong, at Chekan in November, 1883. The Egyptian governor of Darfur and the Bahr-el-Ghazal surrendered in 1884. Only Emin Pasha in Equatoria and the governor of Dongola held out. In 1885 the Mahdi seized Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum, and later entered Khartoum over the mud of the dammed river and killed Chinese Gordon. He was now master of four-fifths of the Egyptian Sudan, but died of typhoid fever the same year. His successor, the Khalifa Abdullah, belonged to the Baggara tribe of Arabian Negroes. He displaced the Nubian relatives of the Mahdi with Darfur people, attacked Abyssinia and killed the Negus John. Emin Pasha abandoned Equatoria in 1889 and the Khalifa Abdullah established himself there in 1892.
Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England’s designs on Abyssinia, and the Italians, encouraged by England, attempted a protectorate. Menelik of Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a shrewd man of predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced to make a treaty with the Italians after King John had been killed by the Mahdists. The exact terms of the treaty were disputed, but undoubtedly the Italians tried by this means to reduce Menelik to vassalage. Menelik stoutly resisted, and at the great battle of Adua, one of the decisive battles of the modern world, the Abyssinians, on March 1, 1896, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians, killing four thousand of them and capturing two thousand prisoners. The empress, Taitou, a full-blooded Negress,13 led some of the charges. By this battle Abyssinia became independent until 1936.
England was startled and her colonial policy was stampeded into a new and vaster policy of economic imperialism. Her dream of Cape to Cairo was threatened by two black men: one in Abyssinia and one in the Sudan; and by the French in alliance with Abyssinia. No sooner did England hear of the battle of Adua, than Kitchener started to Egypt with machine guns and modern military equipment. He recaptured Khartoum in 1898, killing and wounding 27,000 natives at a cost of less than 500 casualties among his troops; the Khalifa was defeated and killed, Osman Digna captured and the tomb of the Mahdi desecrated. The road to the gold and diamonds of Cape Town lay open.
Such in general outline is the strange story of the Valley of the Nile. Strange, not so much because of the facts, but because of the extraordinary interpretation put upon them. By general consent modern historians have cut the history of the Nile Valley entirely away from the history of Africa and most of them deny any connection between the two. This is directly against the known evidence. Egypt was by blood and by cultural development a part of the history of Africa and Negro Africa must be explained certainly in part by the history and development of Egypt. Further than that, in Ethiopia and in what is known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, we have pre-eminently a land of the black race from prehistoric times; and yet today by a narrow and indefensible definition the connection even of Ethiopia with Negro history is denied; while the Sudan is left as a sort of historical no mari s land, and is regarded now as Arabian, now as Egyptian, now as “Hamitic,” and always as not worth careful investigation and study. Its events have been misinterpreted and its heroes, like the Mahdi, maligned and written down as the cause of that very misery and turmoil against which they rebelled and fought. Such at the hands of modern science has been the fate of
That starr’d Ethiop Queen that strove
To set her beauty’s praise above
The Sea nymphs.